Bird Box

twelve

Tom is building something out of an old soft guitar case and a couch cushion. Olympia is sleeping upstairs in the bedroom next to Malorie’s. Felix gave it to her just like Tom gave his to Malorie. Felix now sleeps on the couch in the living room. The night before, Tom took detailed notes of the items Olympia has in her house when she told him. What began as a hopeful conversation resulted in the housemates’ deciding that the few things they could use weren’t worth the risk of getting them. Paper. Another bucket. Olympia’s husband’s toolbox. Still, as Felix pointed out, if and when the need for these objects outweighed the risk, they could fetch them after all. Some things, Don said, might be needed sooner than later. Canned nuts, tuna, pasta, condiments. While discussing foods, Tom explained to the others how much stock they had remaining in the cellar. Because it was finite, it worried Malorie deeply.

Right now, Jules sleeps down the hall in the den. He is on a mattress on the floor at one end of the room. Don’s mattress is at the other. Between them is a high wooden table that holds their things. Victor is in there with him. Jules snores. Soft music plays on the small cassette-deck radio. It’s coming from the dining room, where Felix and Don are playing euchre with a deck of Pee-wee Herman playing cards. Cheryl is washing clothes in a bucket in the kitchen sink.

Malorie is alone with Tom on the couch in the living room.

“The man who owned the house,” Malorie says. “George, that was his name? He placed the ad? He was here when you got here?”

Tom, who is attempting to make a protective, padded cover for the interior windshield of a car, looks Malorie in the eyes. His hair looks extra sandy in the lamplight.

“I was the first one to answer the ad in the paper,” Tom says. “George was great. He’d asked strangers into his home when everyone was locking their doors. And he was progressive, too, a big thinker. He was constantly presenting ideas. Maybe we could look out the windows through lenses? Refracted glass? Telescopes? Binoculars? That was his big idea. If it’s a matter of sight, maybe what we’d need to do is alter our sight line. Or change the physical ways in which we see something. By looking through an object, maybe the creatures couldn’t hurt us. We were both really looking for a way to solve this. And George, being the kind of man he was, wasn’t satisfied with just talking about it. He wanted us to try these theories out.”

As Tom talks, Malorie pictures the face in the photos along the staircase.

“The night Don arrived, the three of us were sitting in the kitchen, listening to the radio, when George suggested there might be some variety of ‘life’ that was causing this to happen. This is before MSNBC proposed that theory. George said he got the idea from an old book, Possible Impossibilities. It talked about irreconcilable life-forms. Two worlds whose compounds were entirely foreign might cause damage to one another if they were to cross paths. And if this other life-form were somehow able to get here… well, that’s what George was saying had happened. That they did figure out a way to travel here, intentionally or not. I loved it. But Don didn’t. He was online a lot back then, researching chemicals, gamma waves, anything unseen that might cause harm if you looked at it because you wouldn’t know you were looking at it. Yeah, Don was pretty hard on us about it. He’s passionate. You can already tell he gets angry. But George was the kind of man who, once he had an idea, was going to see it out, no matter how dangerous it was.

“By the time Felix and Jules arrived, George was ready to test his theory about refracted vision. I read everything with him that he pulled up online. So many websites about eyesight and how the eyes work and optical illusions and refracted light, how exactly telescopes work, and more. We talked about it all the time. When Don, Felix, and Jules were asleep, George and I sat at the kitchen table and drew diagrams. He’d pace back and forth, then he’d stop, turn to me, and ask, ‘Have any of the victims been known to wear glasses? Maybe a closed window could protect us, if certain angles were applied.’ Then we’d talk about that for another hour.

“We all watched the news constantly, hoping for another clue, a piece of information that we’d be able to use to find a way for people to protect themselves. But the reports just started to repeat themselves. And George got impatient. The more he talked about testing his ‘altered vision’ theory, the more he wanted to try it. I was scared, Malorie. But George was like the captain of a sinking ship, and he wasn’t afraid to die. And if it worked? Well, that would mean he’d helped cure the planet of its most terrifying epidemic.”

As Tom speaks, the lamplight dances in his blue eyes.

“What did he use?” Malorie asks.

“A video camera,” Tom says. “He had one upstairs. One of those old VHS cameras. He did it without telling us. One night he set it up behind one of the blankets hanging in the dining room. I woke first that morning and found him asleep on the floor in there. When he heard me, he got up and hurried to the camera. ‘Tom,’ he said, ‘I did it. I recorded five hours of footage. It’s right here, here, inside this camera. I could be holding the cure to this thing. Indirect vision. Film. We have to watch this.’

“I told him I thought it was a bad idea. I also thought it wasn’t likely he’d captured anything in just a five-hour span. But he had a plan that he presented to all of us. He said he needed one of us to tie him to a chair in one of the upstairs bedrooms. He’d watch the footage in there. The way he saw it, tied to the chair, he shouldn’t be able to hurt himself if things went badly. Don got really angry. He told George he was a threat to us all. He rightfully said that we had no idea what we were dealing with, and that if something were to happen to George, then something might happen to us all. But Felix and I weren’t opposed. We voted. Don was the only one who didn’t want him to do it. He talked about leaving. We talked him out of it. And finally, George told us that he didn’t need permission in his own house to do what he wanted to do. So, I told him I’d tie him to the chair.”

“And you did?”

“I did.”

Tom’s eyes travel to the carpet.

“It started with George gasping. Like he had something lodged in his throat. He’d been up there two hours and hadn’t made a sound. Then he starting calling to us. ‘Tom! You piece of shit. Get up here. Get up here.’ He would giggle, then scream, then howl. He sounded like a dog. We heard the chair bang hard against the floor. He was screaming profanities. Jules rose to go help him and I grabbed his arm to stop him. There was nothing we could do except listen. And we heard the entire thing. All the way until the crashing of the chair and the screaming stopped. Then we waited. We waited for a long time. Eventually, we went upstairs together. Blindfolded, we turned the VCR off, then opened our eyes. We saw what George had done to himself. He’d pressed so hard against the ropes that they had gone through his muscles all the way to the bone. His entire body looked like cake frosting, blood and skin folded over the ropes in his chest, his belly, his neck, his wrists, his legs. Felix threw up. Don and I knelt beside George and began cleaning. When we were finished, Don insisted we burn the tape. So we did. And while it was burning I couldn’t stop thinking that with it went our first real theory. It seems that no matter what prism you view them through, they’ll hurt you.”

Malorie is silent.

“You know what, though? He was right. In a way. He hypothesized it was creatures long before the news said as much. He was obviously onto something. Maybe if he had gone about it in a different way, George could have been the kind of guy to change the world.”

There are tears in Tom’s eyes.

“You know what worries me most about that story, Malorie?”

“What?”

“The camera was only running for five hours and it caught something. How many of them are out there?”

Malorie looks to the blankets covering the windows. Then she looks back to Tom. He’s adjusting the windshield protector he’s building. The music comes quietly from the dining room.

“Well,” Tom says, lifting the thing in his hands, “hopefully something like this helps. You know, we can’t stop trying just because George died. Sometimes I think it scarred Don. It did something to him for sure.”

Tom rises and holds the big piece before him. Malorie hears something snap, and the thing Tom is building falls to pieces at his feet.

He turns to Malorie.

“We can’t stop trying.”